Well 2010 was a year that rained bullshit on us and it looks like 2011 won’t be much better, despite the blessed relief of there not being a federal election on.

The hypocritical nature of big business has already stepped up this year and demonstrated its ability to serve up great big steaming plates of fertiliser. Witness the Lew/Harvey/Brookes campaign against online retail. You all know what the campaign is about, so we won’t bother rehashing it, we’ll just make a few ranty points:

This is indeed a worrying world that we more or less live in; beset by problems, confusion and myriad difficulties that could be easily solved if only people listened to clever writers like me.

For example, you know something I’ve noticed lately? Common sense is – if you can believe it – not that common. Take a moment to digest that. See what I’m getting at? I thought of that myself. And isn’t it just the perfect way to sum up the world? If only we had more common sense, how much better off we’d be. If only we remembered the lessons of our parents and our grandparents and our great-grandparents and so on and so forth back through the generations. In fact, the further back you go, the more sensible people were, until you reach about the 1300s, when people had so much common sense they had discovered the secret to cold fusion technology but were unable to implement it because of creeping political correctness.

As we yet again saw when the Queensland floods unfolded, disasters have a knack of bringing out the best in people. Many of those faced with immense hardship usually think of others first. They’ll help a neighbour move their belongings or try save a house from bushfires as their own home lies in ruins. They don’t expect anything in return. For most people, helping others is a way to temporarily forget about their own personal tragedy.

While most of us were struggling to recover from, or still indulging in, the excesses of the stupid season, the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal made a ruling that all but flew under the radar. Indeed, if it wasn’t for Joe Hilderbrand’s article on December 27, I probably wouldn’t have noticed at all.

It’s not news to anyone that The King’s Speech is one of the best films of 2010. If you are one of the few people who haven’t seen it yet, then make some time, sneak past the ushers or download it on someone else’s internet. It is one of those rare films where everything, the acting, direction, script, sets, photography and costumes are all almost faultless.

We’ve seen our fair share of human tragedy in recent times. There was the mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona that left 6 people dead and 14 injured. Closer to home, there has been major flooding in many states, with fatalities and enormous damage in parts of Queensland and Victoria. When events like this happen, there is plenty of analysis and commentary from all angles. Both tragedies have given us stories of heartbreak and heroism, of loss and endurance. But both have also given us something all too familiar – disputes about the cause of the tragedy tend to flare up into battles over who or what is to blame. Those who rushed to point fingers have faced criticism for apportioning blame, while the aftermath is still being felt. At the risk of opening myself up to that criticism, I want to highlight another problem – the lack of solid evidence to back up much of this finger-pointing.

A pasty anarchist/egomaniac, a hilbilly porn-monger and a crusading Jew have been floating around my brain lately, because I’ve been thinking about arseholes whose areholery makes the world a better place.

When Julian Assange isn’t penning anarcho-techhead manifestos that look like they were written to impress the redheaded girl who’s always carrying a book of Marxist poetry around campus, he’s busy shagging that same redheaded girl. And her best friend. In the same week. He’s a slightly creepy little dweeb but what he has achieved with Wikileaks is something both noble and crucial to keeping democracy alive - he has brought truth and accountability to government.

There once was a political party that claimed it was not like the others.

The party was led by a wizened political warrior who spoke compellingly about the major parties being out of touch. His party advocated environmental protection, recognition for indigenous Australians, law reform for gays and equality for all Australians.

The party offered Australian voters a third force in politics and vowed to impose accountability upon the major parties.

There are really only two hard and fast rules in our household. Firstly, Mum is always right. Secondly, there’s no such thing as Star Wars episodes one to three, or anything called a “Special Edition”. And to be honest, the first rule doesn’t always go unchallenged.

For years I refused to buy George Lucas’ desecrations of my favourite childhood movie on DVD, preferring instead to watch laser-disc rips of the original that were passed between true believers. This was how I introduced one of the best known movie franchises of all time to my son and over the intervening years I’ve had to come up with more and more elaborate explanations to dismiss all the evidence of anything that doesn’t fit my definition of the “real” Star Wars.

As I write this, a lot of Australia is underwater. The people of Southeast Queensland have been all but swept to sea. Towns have disappeared, people lost and lives destroyed. Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia have all felt nature’s wrath and been subject to disastrous flooding. The scale and aftermath of January 2011 will be years in quantifying and decades in rectifying.

Something struck me today as I lay in a pile of detritus in the couch, silently taking in the coverage of the Queensland floods: a parade of reporters gurning for the cameras, expressing a kind of shocked surprise and astonishment at the army of volunteers having turned up to uncover Brisbane’s suburbs from beneath a pile of stinking, toxic mud and garbage. I do believe I heard the word “miracle” thrown about a few times. I felt a sudden sense of annoyance come over me and it took me a few hours of schmutzing around the house, aimlessly sweeping piles of dust around, to work out why.

When I was 21, my family doctor asked me to bring in a urine sample for my next appointment.

The morning of the appointment, I duly filled up a large vegemite jar and brought it into the surgery, where I sat, awkwardly, in the waiting room, desperately wishing I’d brought along a bag.

When my doctor was ready to see me, I quickly thrust the jar into his hands.

“Good effort, [NDM]!” he said, encouragingly. “But, actually, I only really needed *this much*.”

Juzzy's aspiring to DA heights, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it how close he's getting...

The old adage is true; you can’t please all of the people all of the time. This past month I have been lambasted, mostly with good nature, by friends over my selection of what I considered to be Car of the Year, the Bugatti Veyron SuperSport.

Questions have been asked. Questions such as,

“How the hell can you choose a car that costs more than $2million?”

“There’s only going to be five made. Are you insane?”

“Don’t you think accessibility is the key component to choosing Car of the Year?”

The answers of course are:

Easily. Quite possibly. No.

Salade Niçoise (pronounced n-ee-s-w-ah-z) is a traditional rustic French salad originating in Nice. Frequently enjoyed as a luncheon dish, it has been interpreted in countless ways and many permutations of it exist. It may be presented as colourful individual platters or in a large bowl with attractively arranged ingredients from which diners help themselves.

The beauty of a dish like this is that, although the olives, eggs, raw onion and tuna are fundamental to it, many combinations of ingredients work well.

A belated Happy New Year’s to all our King’s Tribune readers and I hope you have successfully navigated the treacherous holiday season unscathed. We start 2011 with a bit of a kerfuffle in the Australian wine world. Stephen Pannell, an excellent and much respected wine maker from McLaren Vale, very publicly proposed an idea that from January 2011 Australian wine punters should drink only Australian wine. He openly expressed his frustration that everywhere he seemed to turn, whether it be in the press, the web or actual wine events or the industry, people were choosing and promoting, at least to his eyes and ears, imported wines. Pannell said to Decanter magazine “Australian wine is not travelling well even in our own market. There’s almost a cultural cringe about our wines but we should have pride in them. It’s hypocritical to eat local and then drink Chianti”. I have met Stephen Pannell and to say he is a man with some strong opinions is clearly an understatement.

Oh Andrew Hilditch, you just give and give. If it weren’t for Bangladesh being allowed to play Test cricket, this would have been one of the worst series losses anywhere, ever, by any team. And yet you stand there (for once) in front of the media and proudly say the selectors did a good job.

Of course, when asked exactly how the selectors’ job recently could be defined as something approaching “good”, you actually didn’t have an answer. Which is about as surprising as Tony Greig spruiking a Limited Edition print of a shit photo, I suppose, so any disappointment I feel should be filed under “meh”.